World Watch Report's Research on iPhone Applications

Apple’s iPhone is hot, luxury wrist watches are hot. So why not combine these two? More and more watch manufacturers are creating iPhone applications for watch freaks that are eager to learn about their favorite brand (like Jaeger-LeCoultre did) or just to showcase their line-up of watches.

World Watch Report (IC-Agency) decided to analyse the market of iPhone applications for luxury brands and asked a number of luxury watches bloggers, journalists and professionals from the luxury watch industry about their opinions and input. Being both an iPhone fan and luxury watch blogger for quite some time now, and an IT professional, I thought it might be a good idea to participate with World Watch Report.

A number of questions were asked by IC-Agency and I took some time to answer them properly. All answers need some timely processing, so my guess is that short answers will work best.

– What should brands take into account before launching an application?

Simplicity and useability. The Jaeger-LeCoultre iPhone application is a great example of a useable application with its catalogue and watch school. The Breitling iPhone application is not. It doesn’t let you play around with the application, explore different models etc. It is too static. Perhaps even more important, what’s the goal of the iPhone application? What do you want to tell the downloaders of such an application? Buy a watch? Explore our brand? Give them a sense of ‘join the club/you are part of our club’?

So, simplicity/useability, clear goal & target audience.

– According to you, what are the best practices in that field? What can brands concretely expect from it?

Like any other development best practice for software or websites: useability is KEY. There are numerous best / leading practices for software development that focus on useability. One of the main things that works best is to appoint a pilot team that is representative for their target audience. This pilot team should be part of the prototyping lifecycle of the application. This will not only phase out bugs/errors, but will also give the designers great feedback on useability, functionality and performance.

In the end, a luxury brand will be able to release/introduce a proper working application that is tried & tested by a representative team for their luxury products.

– What is your futurology? Which evolutions do you see in the near future?

Platform independent applications that will enable users to have the latest information on the brand, connect to other enthusiasts of the brand (social networking) through the application and have brand videos pushed to the iPhone (or whatever hardware platform used) on demand.

You can view IC-Agency’s presentation on iPhone Applications and the Luxury Brands below: